Hello All,

The Free Pascal and Lazarus teams are in the process of switching to Gitlab to manage their source code and issue reports.

In order to lower maintenance of their own infrastructure, a hosted solution has been chosen, and an open source license was granted to the teams.

You can see the current progress at:

https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org

2 subgroups have been made:

https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc
https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/lazarus-ide

Several testconversions of the SVN history to a Git repository have been done, with ever improving results. All repositories will be switched to git.

A program has been written to convert Mantis bug reports to Gitlab issues; it is very complete, and all available info will be converted. You can see (partial) conversion results on the above projects.

The date for the final conversion has been established as the weekend of 17/18 july. People that wish to report bugs after that will have to create a gitlab account in order to do so. (Those with a github account can normally also use that account to log in with gitlab, see the gitlab login page.)

The conversion program will attempt to convert existing bugs using the account of the new gitlab user. To map your gitlab user name (or ID) to the mantis user, we ask that you file an issue in the mantis project of the current bugtracker, assign it the category gitlab, and set the summary of the bugreport to your gitlab account name or ID number (not both!).

All accounts that can be collected in this manner by 17 july will be used in the final conversion.

All necessary information to connect to gitlab will be collected in the FPC & Lazarus Wiki. Several pages have already been set up:

https://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_git
https://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_git_concepts
https://wiki.freepascal.org/SVN_to_GIT_Cheatsheet

These pages will be updated with the correct URLS when the final conversion happens. The FPC & Lazarus websites will also be adapted with new instructions.

For the FPC & Lazarus teams,

Michael.

I thought the plan was to move to GitHub? I never used GitLab before so can you explain the reasoning here?

Regards,
Ryan Joseph

Ryan Joseph via fpc-devel schrieb am Di.,
22. Juni 2021, 23:49:

The plan has *never* been GitHub. The original plan was self hosted with a *mirror* on GitHub. Now we'll instead use GitLab as main repository with a mirror on GitHub.
With GitLab we have at least the option to move back to a self hosted version keeping the same interface if the insanity of real world politics should prove it necessary.

Also GitLab isn't that different from GitHub from a user's point of view. Some options might be at different locations or might be named differently, but it's still a web interface geared towards to same use case.

Regards,
Sven

On Jun 22, 2021, at 4:02 PM, Sven Barth wrote: The plan has *never* been GitHub. The original plan was self hosted with a *mirror* on GitHub. Now we'll instead use GitLab as main repository with a mirror on GitHub.

How does the mirroring work? It seems 99% of the dev world is using GitHub now so it's a pity to have to learn new tools if we don't have to. I'm very happy with GitHub myself and use it often.

Regards,
Ryan Joseph

Just like the mirroring of everyone else not using GitHub as main repository works - and there are many! Especially the bigger ones (LLVM comes to mind, Linux as well and ReactOS). You'll be able to pull from GitHub and issue Pull Requests which we in turn are able to apply. What won't work however are issues. Those will only be available on the main repository.

Also please note that we probably won't set up the mirror right away.

And as I said: GitLab and GitHub aren't /that/ different regarding their use. In my opinion there is no excuse not to learn these differences and work with GitLab directly as well. You'll have to for bug reports anyway.

Regards,
Sven

Michael v.C. send a mail on the topic before.

GitLab is open source. If the company fails, we can take the last version, and self host again.

Also afaik, the "open source account" that gitlab offers is way better than github. (also with respect to the issue tracker capabilities.) Though, I do not have a comparison list.

There may have been other reasons. As I said M.v.C did sent an answer to that earlier.

If you know github, then gitlab will not be that different. (though yes, the menu structure is not 1 to 1 => so a few minutes to find some of the features)

First of all, most work on the code is done in git => on your PC. So that is identical.

Issue trackers are similar. gitlab offers a few things on top (like issue boards, a configurable view of issues grouped by some criteria)

"pull requests" are called "merge request", otherwise similar too.

---
Apparently (according to Michael) github credentials can even be used for login ...

Hopefully I should be able to get to grips with the command line interface so I can update my local copy through gitlab while also coinciding with all my local git branches for development (mixing SVN and git has been an... interesting experience!)

Gareth aka. Kit

J. Gareth Moreton wrote

Hopefully I should be able to get to grips with the command line interface so I can update my local copy through gitlab while also coinciding with all my local git branches for development (mixing SVN and git has been an... interesting experience!)

I think you will have to do a new clone of the git repo, because the one published on github now has nothing to do with what we will be publishing.

Michael.